A method of probe refinement for fault diagnosis

In order to obtain the information of the actual execution sequences, probes are required to be deployed in the system, which may influence the operation of system. In this paper, a method of probe refinement is proposed to reduce the cost of probes. By taking the distinction capacity of component as heuristic information, and considering the actual constraints such as that the probes in different positions impact the system differently, the algorithm of reduction is applied to remove these components which can not affect the recognition of the execution sequences. Then the necessary information of the sequences can be obtained with fewer probes deployed in the rest components. Meanwhile, the strategy is discussed and implemented to ensure the completeness of the result. Finally, the experiment shows that the refinement method can reduce the overheads of introducing probes effectively.